gentoo

The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.

Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.

See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.

Comment · 8 months ago

Sure, the state has always had theoretical power to do this, but when was the last time something remotely like this actually happened?

Comment · 8 months ago

The whole reason this is a story is that the government won't just refuse to contract, it will put the equivalent of soft sanctions on the company because Anthropic refuses to contract.

Comment · 1 year ago

The "disparate impact" test applies mainly in civil rights act litigation, and it's extremely hard to make a case under that theory. It's a three-part test, and showing that a particular policy has a disparate impact on one race is just the first hurdle.

You also have to prove that the party acted with malice: either the policy exists for explicitly racist reasons, or the race-neutral justification is pretextual. If you can do that, you _also_ have to prove that there is a less-discriminatory alternative policy that achieves the same goal.

see, e.g., https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7#C'

It is definitely not de facto illegal to have a racially lopsided student body -- the school might be asked to justify the specific policy or practice that led to that outcome on race-neutral grounds, but saying "GPA and test scores" would be more than enough.

Comment · 1 year ago

I love this article because I think this is the conversation we should be having. Lots of advertising is harmful, some of it is useful on balance, and some of it is too hard to ban without infringing on other desirable speech. But I do think we should be critically thinking about all advertising and outlawing certain flavors of it.

Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.

Comment · 2 years ago

> His great transgression, according to Berlin, was to say aloud what everyone knows but no one will admit: multiple ideals cannot be simultaneously attained. We can’t have everything good all at once.

Everyone will admit this. No one honestly believes all virtues are equally and simultaneously attainable. At any given time, certain things must be prioritized.

But some of us believe that it's not a zero-sum game; that "human nature" is not set in stone, and that it is a worthy project to try and engineer conditions which allow more of humanity's virtues to flourish. Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding. He also seems to believe that it's correct to trade individual prosperity for state power and glory.

Comment · 3 years ago

also, the person who owns the land is often liable for what happens on it, unless the land is owned by the public (a la BLM land).

Comment · 3 years ago

I think it's that both were websites that catapulted you into truly random, non-targeted interactions -- Omegle with a random person, StumbleUpon with a random site.

Comment · 3 years ago

how about we build a robust social safety net so that stealing less than $1000 worth of stuff is not the best way to survive

Comment · 3 years ago

the distinction is real in the model of the turing machine, and it's close to real in many of the machines and programs we've built so far. It's not real in nature, in brains. Code is data and vice versa. A memory is a program that runs and reinforces itself.